(Let’s just hope the third number doesn’t rise and Kanye keeps the Donda 2 experience confined to 2022.)
#8BIT DRUMMER CREEP UPDATE#
The first four Donda 2 songs arrived on Wednesday, less than 24 hours after the listening party, and the biggest update thus far came the next day via a patch titled “V.2.22.22 MIAMI,” a name that would seem to indicate we’re due for many more updates as days turn to weeks and those numbers creep up. But rather than working on the songs until they’re ready for mass consumption, he’s doled them out through data dumps on the Stem Player, a disc-like device that lets users remix Ye’s latest songs and break them down to their individual components-and that will reportedly be the only place listeners can officially hear Donda 2 because of Kanye’s gripes with streamers like Spotify, The Ringer’s parent company.
Similar to his previous album, he debuted a handful of tracks at a somewhat-disastrous live event, this one held last week in Miami. With Donda 2, he’s taken that approach a step further.
If Kanye learned nothing else in 2021, it’s that hordes of people are willing to buy tickets (and corresponding merch) or tune in just to get a glimpse of his artistry, even if that meant trying to parse scratch vocals and unfinished beats. Of all the Kanye release antics of recent years, the Donda rollout feels most instructive for the current chaos surrounding its sequel. (Sometimes it was hard to keep track of the changes amid the chaos: Kid Cudi was added to and removed from “Remote Control” as many times as he’s shuffled onto and off of Kanye’s Instagram Close Friends list.) He took this build-the-plane-as-you-fly-it ethos to its extreme last summer when he debuted the first Donda during three livestreamed stadium listening parties, which gave fans a peek into his creative process and allowed them to watch songs blossom from bare-bones sketches to full-blown compositions ahead of the album’s official release in August. Since Yeezus, he’s fixed “Wolves” and tinkered endlessly with The Life of Pablo, snapped a photo for an album cover on the way to the listening party for said album, and started and stopped and restarted more projects than most artists drop in their entire careers, finding Jesus and skating past countless planned release dates in the process. This reality-where the very idea of a Kanye album is an amorphous concept-is one we’ve been hurtling toward for nearly a decade now, since he narrowly hit the deadline for 2013’s Yeezus and received universal praise for the project, like a student who gets an A+ after popping Adderall to pull an all-nighter. But two decades on from The College Dropout and the early events of jeen-yuhs, this is the current state of Kanye West, in which albums are living documents whose real-time creation has been packaged and commodified alongside the music itself. It’s the type of rough draft the onetime perfectionist would’ve previously never let escape his hard drive. To call “Happy” unfinished is generous-it’s barely started. But in their current form, they’re giving Genius editors fits. (A small sample: “When the gun of sun, when I’m in it / Tinted, squint it, been it, y’all know it been a minute.”) They’re clearly- hopefully-reference tracks, vocals meant for Kanye to work out his flow before going back and adding something of substance. What do we make, then, of a half-baked song like “Happy,” one of the 16 tracks from his new album, Donda 2, that have been released in the past week via the $200 Ye-branded Donda Stem Player? After an opening verse from the album’s executive producer, Future, Kanye drops three straight, each more unintelligible than the last. The footage of an unsigned Kanye is powerful-he’s not the world’s best rapper, but he believes himself to be, or at least understands that to get to where he wants to, he needs to rap as if he belongs atop the mountain. The first two acts of jeen-yuhs, the excellent decades-in-the-making Netflix documentary about Kanye West’s rise to fame, revolve mostly around one big question: Why won’t anyone take him seriously as a rapper? The film paints a picture of a young superproducer desperate to break out as a solo artist, bursting into rooms to play demos for unamused executives and rapping songs like “Two Words” for the camera with crystal clarity, as if he’ll never get another chance to.
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